UQ's sixth Sustainability Week has come to a close, and what a week it was! With 62 events and record-breaking numbers, this was our biggest Sustainability Week yet.
We had a huge range of sustainability-themed offerings this year, all of them free and open to staff, students and the general public. From food trucks, solar tours and pop-up shops to lunchbox lectures, workshops and film screenings, there truly was something for everyone—and the response from the UQ community was overwhelming.
Attendance was up 6.5 times on 2017, and we engaged at least 160,000 people in total (online and face to face). It's worth noting that 50% of our online engagement came from outside Brisbane, with almost 10% of that from outside Australia. This not only demonstrates the broad outreach of Sustainability Week in particular, but also indicates widening interest in sustainability and community initiatives that can raise awareness and encourage behavioural change.
Our most popular events this year ran the sustainability gamut from food to architecture and everything in between: audiences loved the taste of Meat-free Monday and Fresh Food Friday, and were especially keen to learn about tiny houses, discover the future of transport at the electric vehicle expo and work up a sweat at Parkrun.
The Sustainability Office would like to say a huge thank you to all the event hosts, participants and volunteers who made this year's Sustainability Week such a success. UQ was recently announced as a finalist in the 2018 Green Gown Awards for this very event, and we're delighted to see how Sustainability Week has become such a fixture of the University calendar. We can't wait to do it all again in 2019!
